I’m interested in the digital literacy of researchers for a couple of reasons:

1) It surely makes sense to better understand how researchers use digital tools in the context of research so that we are better able to support them

2) I believe that these digital tools are key to researchers building their own professional profile in an increasingly competitive academic research environment.

The slides I used to support this workshop are below.

Prezi for #druwe

We started out the morning by highlighting some of the hopes & fears that researchers have about using social media tools… I predicted that the fears would fall into three broad categories:

Information overload – the fear that engaging in social media would be too much information to keep track of

Digital Identity – concern over what to share about oneself, privacy issues and the blurring of private versus professional

Data/intellectual property concerns – what happens if I share something that someone else exploits/stealing of ideas

Hopes and fears

Hopes

Basic overview of what is out there

Getting research out there

To become more aware of others with similar interest & activities to my own

Catch up with colleagues who use twitter/blogs naturally

Which button do I press?

How to quantify opinion (or research data) gathered via social media tools

Fears

Maintaining privacy

Managing a digital reputation

How do I edit the digital me?

Will this become another distraction?

Digital Identity

We spent some time discussing online identity, how to balance the “personal me” vs the “professional me”, how different tools lend themselves to different purposes and how actively managing information about yourself is a good thing to do.

“We don’t have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it”. – Erik Qualman

Twitter

We asked the participants to use twitter to interact with their networks using the hashtag #druwe

Managing information overload

Using social media tools in research

There is increasing concern about ensuring rigour when using digital tools to gather research data. At UWE, we have some guidance available on the Research Ethics pages. I think there is still some way to go to understand better how this area of social media use can be supported.

We discussed how research is social & iterative, the benefits of engaging with folks far and wide about your research outputs and how to use tools to make the finding out about knowledge a little easier. We had a play around with some social citation tools, e.g. CiteULike, Zotero & Mendeley

@paulspencer42 Really useful course but could also be good to explore using digital/social media as a research tool #druwe

Great workshop Paul and good to see you practice what you preach with a really useful blog post too! A couple of things that may be of interest:
The Social Research Associaton is hosting a conference on ‘Social Media in Social Research Conference’, on June 24th in central London:http://the-sra.org.uk/events/
There’s also a new network looking at ‘should social scientists embrace social media and, if so, what are the implications for methods and practice?’ On 11 March, 4 – 5pm the network will be hosting a Twitter chat: http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/tweet-on-twitter-chat-monday-11-feb.html